Read Red Sox Rule for Free Online Page B

know that I wouldn’t manage like this. This isn’t managing. I would have already known some of this stuff.”
    They looked at the clock and it was close to 6:00. They had spent an entire day together, talking, debating, and watching baseball. It was time for them to leave the park and head to a restaurant called the Atlantic Fish Company; they couldn’t bring Francona to Boston without giving him some seafood. There were no tests with the menu, no tests on how he held his fork or sat in his chair. He ate, he laughed, and he had a few beers.
    He remembered the time he and Millsie were driving in Arizona before a Phillies–Diamondbacks game. The Phillies stunk and the Diamondbacks didn’t. He looked at Millsie, his friend since college, and said, “Imagine what it’s like to be them, coming to the ballpark every night knowing that you have a chance to win.”
    God, he missed that. As he sat there having a beer, he knew Boston would be the type of place where he would have a chance every night. He wanted the job, and Epstein wanted him to have it. They agreed that if they were going to work together, they would need the type of relationship where one man didn’t feel the need to tiptoe around the other.
    “I don’t need the manager to make decisions that I agree with, but I have the right to know why something happened—and vice versa,” Epstein said to Francona. “And if we can’t get to that point in our relationship, then I think we will fail.”
    Francona was relieved. He saw it the same way, so they shook on it.

New School
     
    N o one knows when it happened exactly. It’s one of those cultural shifts that make it seem as if the world changes overnight: one day you’re insensitive and inappropriate, and the next you’re a comic with your own HBO special. Or you go to bed as a veteran senior analyst and wake up as the old guy who is forced to take the corporate buyout. Maybe you were the one “telling it like it is” before the curtain fell, and when it was raised again all your lines called for less vinegar and more diplomacy.
    One night baseball drew the shades, and at daybreak an old job description—manager—had a brand-new glossary. And a handful of management styles went on the same list as the dodo.
    It’s not that Earl Weaver, Walter Alston, Dick Williams, and Sparky Anderson couldn’t have handled the strategy of today. They’re all in the Hall of Fame; the strategy of baseball Now would be a breeze to the men of baseball Then. Weaver was celebrating on-base percentages, obsessing over matchups, and despising bunts in Baltimore at least 30 years before those were principles in Oakland. Alston was one of the early arrivals on the first floor of social and athletic adaptation: in 1946, he was theminor league manager of African Americans Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, a year before the Dodgers integrated the sport; and in 1971, his Dodgers were among the first teams to scrap the four-man pitching rotation in favor of the now-modern five-man staff. They’d all figure out the baseball. It’s the language that would drive them crazy.
    What, exactly, is “creating an atmosphere in which a player is comfortable”? Why does a player hitting .233 need an “explanation” for why he’s not in the lineup tonight? What’s this drivel in the newspaper about “showing up a player” by calling him out within earshot of teammates, fans, and media? Alston was a lamb compared to the late Billy Martin, but even he challenged his players to fights and followed them to their hotel rooms when they came in past curfew. Do that now and you’re taken through a media assembly line: The writers will throw their ink on you, they’ll pass you off to be yelled at on talk radio, they’ll kick you into the land of TV debates and 24-hour “Breaking News” crawls, and they’ll let you come to in a room where you can watch the original incident online because a fan put it on YouTube.
    Then there’s the